Obvious, Innit?

No rocket science, and no great insight, but I wanted to post something to close out the year, and this is it. I’ve had an interest in photography all my life, from when my dad used to develop and bring his (and my) B&W photos (and his enlarger was home-made).  An interest in audio came along only a short while later, albeit mainly with the listening side; just over 10 years ago, I took responsibility for our church sound system and that started a deeper interest in the recording side.  Along came Covid-19 and the lockdown led to a need to try out video – initially with my smartphone.  Video was relatively easy and, since then, I’ve been digging deeper into the art.  My DSLR now shares its lenses with a semi-pro video camera, and my audio kit has grown from a digital field recorder to a collection of mics and recorders.  I could never use it all at the same time, but they all get used.  My videos will never get awards but they’re getting better.

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Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

I recently found this draft, written and put to one side as I wasn’t entirely happy with it. It still needs work to be a good article but I’m posting it as-is. Here goes:

When reading Charles Handy’s “Gods of Management”, I was fascinated to see a list of factors that are believed to have led to the decline of the Roman empire, referencing Gordon Rattray Taylor as his original source.  Many of Handy’s predictions from over 30 years ago (especially from “The Empty Raincoat”) look eerily accurate so these are worthy of attention. Continue reading →

Use Your BRAIN

In “The Book About Getting Older”*, Dr Lucy Pollock references the acronym BRAN, used by many physicians when prescribing medication.  In Dr Pollock’s situation, as a specialist in geriatric medicine, it’s of especial relevance when dealing with polypharmacy (the situation where multiple drugs are being prescribed to a patient); as we get old, medical problems rarely come in isolation and it’s important to be aware of side-effects and interactions.  Even without the complication of age, it’s easy to stray into polypharmacy and she gives an example of a patient ending up on a cocktail of drugs to manage pain, blood pressure, incontinence, and constipation – all as a result of a painful knee.  The “I” is added to the acronym to bring in a further consideration that often becomes more critical when treating the more elderly patients.

Read more: Use Your BRAIN

Outwith the medical area, I think the BRAIN approach is useful when considering many changes to processes, whether to fix a problem or as part of continuous improvement.  The five questions are:

Will it make things Better?

An obvious question for any change, but we often need reminding to ask it.  It’s not necessarily wrong to introduce changes without any specific improvement in mind (the Hawthorn experiment comes to mind) but, if a specific improvement is the objective, we need to be confident the change will bring that about.

What are the Risks?

Changes rarely happen in isolation and we need to be aware of the wider effects, mitigate any negatives we may foresee, and be prepared to respond with any we don’t.

What are the Alternatives?

We may have already considered the options, but it’s easy to get too focussed on our favourites (or familiar solutions) and overlook others.

What does our Intuition say?

We try to make decisions on the basis of fact.  “Gut responses” should be the domain of the emergency, when we don’t have time to gather all the information and a fast response is more likely to be better than done.  However, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t pause and ask if the action we’re about to take seems right.  Instinct might just stop us doing something stupid, despite the facts seemingly pointing in that direction.  It might make us go back and challenge what had initially seemed a safe assumption.

What will happen if we do Nothing?

Doing nothing is an option we should always consider.  If we’ve spent time and resources on an improvement or corrective/preventive action project, it’s unlikely doing nothing has been a real option.  However, as with the previous question, we can get so caught up in action that we overlook inaction.  Returning, briefly, to the medical world, there’s an idiom along the lines of “the cure is worse than the disease”.

I’m not suggesting BRAIN replaces DMAIC, 8D, Juran, Potter, etc.  Rather, consider it a check phase to be introduced before taking that final step of committing.

*Pollock, L. (2021) The book about getting older, London, Penguin

ISBN 978-1-405-94443-4

Ask The Dog

I suspect many of you may know “The Nun’s Prayer”.  For those who don’t, and to serve as a reminder, it goes along the lines of:

Lord, grant me the courage to change what must be changed,
The serenity to accept what can’t be changed,
And the wisdom to know the difference.

It aligns with the saying, sometimes used in management circles: Only worry about what you are able to manage.

Easy to say, much harder to achieve.

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Time for a Change

There are many people making a living helping organisations establish change management systems. There are others who offer corporate risk management systems, and yet others with continual improvement systems. I could also add lean-six-sigma, corporate culture management and a host more, but let’s take a step back and look at the bigger picture with different glasses.

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Fear

This post may be a bit off the wall, but worth consideration (well, I think so, anyway – and it’s my blog)!  Many years ago, when a relatively new engineer in a large multinational services company, there was a manager of one of the operational sites who instilled fear in the members of the projects team I worked with.  One day somebody suggested, probably in jest, that he was shy.  That got me thinking – perhaps he really was shy and his attitude (which would have been deemed bullying today) was his way of coping.  I had that in mind on my next visit to his site and, changing my approach to that of dealing with a shy person, we got on brilliantly.  Continue reading →

Putting Practice into Theory

If you ever stop learning you should probably scan for your name in the obituary column of you local paper.  It’s never too late to start a programme of formal study.  I had entered the quality management discipline from engineering, not because I saw it as a field I was interested in but because I was offered a job that offered a better salary and a move to a new area.  Continue reading →